2025
2024

Annual Summit 2025

September 25-27, 2025

SILICON VALLEY, USA

Overview

Defining Futures, Reimagining Roles

Our Annual Summit 2025, Defining Futures, Reimagining Roles, brought together senior design executives to confront how the AI era is transforming industries, leadership, and the very nature of enterprise value. We examined the forces reshaping markets, the expanding mandate of design leadership, and the capabilities needed to compete and lead at the highest level.

This year, over 30 leading design executives gathered in the heart of Silicon Valley and explored how these forces are redefining the role of design executives and their teams. Together, they reimagined the roles, strategies, and practices needed to thrive in this new era, and emerged with a clear, actionable agenda to drive impact in the year ahead.

Day 1: Sept 25, 2025

Defining Futures and Scenarios

Drawing from their own organizations, members unpacked current business challenges and revealed how design is guiding strategic responses across the enterprise. Some provocations that emerged through these discussions included: how are design leaders using their skills to influence company vision and what does that look like in practice? How might design executives help their organizations completely rethink the enterprise experience in the intelligence era? Where and how should design as a function shape CEO/board decisions and company vision?

Day 2: Sept 26, 2025

Reimagining Roles and Leadership

On Day 2, design leaders moved through four focused tracks that connected future-thinking to the practical realities of leading an AI-integrated enterprise. In “Visions & Futures,” executives framed foresight as a core capability, enabling them to move beyond quarterly constraints and work with ten-year horizons, macro signals, and accelerating change. This flowed into “Business Strategy,” where design was positioned as a strategic function to de-risk technological investments, identify new revenue streams, and boost efficiency by integrating human-centered evidence into financial and operational discussions.

The discussions also explored the future of “Product Development,” acknowledging a new “run-time” environment in which AI-integrated products continuously learn and evolve, challenging traditional product–design–engineering models. Finally, “People & Culture” focused on talent, identity, and organizational mindset in an AI-compressed world: hiring for critical thinking over tools and envisioning an organizational culture where design is a shared capability, not just a function.

Across all four tracks, design executives compared approaches to leading through ongoing reorgs and shifting priorities, emphasizing steadiness, influence, and what many described as graceful leadership in times of change.

Day 3: Sept 27, 2025

Aligning on DXC’s 2026 Roadmap

The final day focused on shaping DXC’s 2026 roadmap and turning the Council’s perspectives gathered over the year into a forward-looking Design Leadership Playbook. Members converged on the future scope of design executive roles, with ~60% indicating growth in their remit across functions like product management, front-end engineering, back-end engineering, analytics, customer success, and data science, including P&L responsibilities. What followed across the tracks was not only an exploration of roles and responsibilities, but also of mindset and what it takes to lead in an era where the ground keeps shifting.

Attendees

Andy Vitale
Andy Vitale
Global Head of UX Design and Research
at
Chatham Financial
Arin Bhowmick
Arin Bhowmick
Chief Design Officer
at
SAP
Brian Rice
Brian Rice
VP, Global Head of Design
at
Newell Brands
Caleb Schmidt
Caleb Schmidt
SVP of Experience Design
at
U.S. Bank
Christian Rohrer
Christian Rohrer
VP of Human Centered Design
at
TD Bank Group
Christina Vallery
Christina Vallery
Chief Design Officer
at
The Cigna Group
Christopher Kiley
Christopher Kiley
Chief Design Officer
at
Boeing Digital
Cindy Chastain
Cindy Chastain
Fmr. SVP of Customer Experience and Design
at
Mastercard

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